


The Thin Ice

by OnlySkyAboveMe



Category: Figure Skating RPF, Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Hospitalization, Major Character Injury, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-09 12:27:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14716031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnlySkyAboveMe/pseuds/OnlySkyAboveMe
Summary: ‘Dr Grey looked up from her clipboard when she heard a young, frantic voice asking for help. She thought her years of experience in medicine would have stopped her from ever being surprised by the sorts of things that came in through those ER doors.’ORThe TS/Grey’s Anatomy crossover that I doubt anyone asked for.





	1. Chapter One

Dr Grey was having a tedious day. The nurses’ lounge coffee machine was broken; her room mates were pissing her off as they were working opposite shifts and couldn’t keep it down when she was meant to be sleeping; and if she has to stich another laceration made by some DIY tools or remove another splinter she was going to go crazy. What was it about the summer that made people decide to try their hand at building all manner of useless objects in their back yard? 

Her shift was long from over and it seemed like the day would continue to drag on for the next 10 hours. She hated days like this, ones where that slightly sociopathic part of you wants there to be some huge car crash or warehouse fire, just so you’ll have something to do! Instead, she tried to accept the relative calm and she turned back to her paperwork.

10 minutes and two sets of discharge paperwork later, Dr Grey looked up from her clipboard when she heard a young, frantic voice asking for help. She thought her years of experience in medicine would have stopped her from ever being surprised by the sorts of things that came in through those ER doors. 

Encased in concrete: check. 

Nails blown into your head with a nail gun: check. 

IUD and piercing stuck together during sex: check. 

Clearly, she was wrong. 

A messy-haired boy with a bloody nose, sneakers half-on his feet and workout trousers with a rip in the seam on the side was moving at speed towards the desk. In any other circumstances, she thought he could be a college kid who’d got into a drunken fight or fallen off his skateboard, were it not for the girl he was carrying carefully and effortlessly in his arms. Her hands were clasped tightly together around his neck, where her face was also buried, her arms were tense and her breathing uneven, clearly in a severe amount of pain. She was wearing a leotard and a pair of black leggings which stopped at a pair of white ice skates. Nope, definitely never seen that before!

Dr Grey wasn’t the only doctor who noticed their entrance. Dr Hunt and Dr Karev were already making their way over to them, and when the girl lifted her face from the boy’s shoulder to reveal a gash over her eyebrow and a friction burn down the side of her face Dr Hunt quickly ordered for the arrival of a gurney.

“Here kid, put her down on here,” he said urgently. The girl did not look in great shape: eyes full of tears and pain, teeth gritted, fists clenched, back and shoulders tense. Whilst the trauma on her face was bloody, experience told Dr Grey that this was not the main cause of the pain the kid was clearly in. The boy set her down on the bed gently. Dr Grey frowned, the girl didn’t look much smaller than him, perhaps only an inch or two, and he looked to be a fairly scrawny thing. Yet the way he held and manoeuvred her was effortless. Her attention was drawn back to the matter at hand when the girl gasped as her legs changed position as they touched the bed.

Dr Karev stepped towards them both, pulling on a pair of gloves and adjusting the stethoscope around his neck. “Ok kids…”

“We’re not kids” said the boy quickly, his voice louder and deeper than his plea before, clearly peeved at being perceived as a child, “I’m 20, she’s 19.”

“Oh, sorry.” said Karev, clearly a bit taken aback by his misjudgement. They look so young, except their eyes - those look wise beyond their years. “Anyway, tell us what’s going on, what’s happened here?” He moves his hands to inspect the wound on her face.

“No! It’s my legs,” she said breathlessly, “they feel like they’re being stabbed by red hot razor blades. But they’re also numb, I can’t feel them, only the pain.”

Hunt looked at the girl in confusion from the end of the bed, “Your legs? Then what happened to your face, to both of your faces?” 

The boy explained the situation. No, they weren’t a couple of foolish kids messing around on an ice rink for fun – Grey knows how many broken wrists and ankles Torres has to deal with around Christmas when the public rinks in the park open up and everyone suddenly thinks they’re Nancy Kerrigan– they’re athletes, ice dancers with a serious shot of making the Olympics in 18 months. They had stayed late at the rink, wanting to run their lifts again. She had gone to jump into his arms at speed, her legs went numb and gave out underneath her, but she had so much forward momentum that she still launched herself horizontally at him. He couldn’t fully recall what had happened, but she had somehow ended up almost upside down as he fell backwards, his toe pick caught her eyebrow. He just remembered grabbing on to her tightly and breaking her fall with his own body (he has not, and will not, ever, drop her). 

“Her knee must have caught my nose or something,” he said, swiping the blood away with the sleeve of his long-sleeved t-shirt with a maple leaf motif on the shoulders. “I don’t know, I was just focussed on catching her. I scooped her right off the ice and into my car and drove her here.”

“You probably should have called an ambulance” Dr Karev said.

“No way, do you know how much those things cost? Our parents pay enough for us to skate in this country, we definitely can’t afford medical care here. The only reason I didn’t drive over the border to the hospital was because I could see how much pain she was in, she wouldn’t have managed 2 hours in the car. Plus, her face is bleeding.”

“Ok kid…” began Hunt.

“Scott, my name is Scott” he said, glowering again.

“OK. Scott, relax. Dr Brown!” Hunt called across the ER to the intern hanging around near the supply closet, who promptly came hurrying over, looking apprehensive. “Dr Brown, clean up Scott’s nose and check him over will you. We’ll start assessing his friend here.”

“Tessa, she’s Tessa” Scott said.

“Right. Scott, you get yourself cleaned up with Dr Brown, we will take care of Tessa.”

Scott very grudgingly allowed himself to be steered across the ER by the young intern. He kept his eyes fixed on Tessa as Dr Brown messed about with the gauze, which he promptly dropped on the floor. Scott rolled his eyes so hard and sighed so impatiently he felt dizzy for a moment. In his impatience with the flustered intern, he simply grabbed the dropped gauze off the cart and began wiping the blood from beneath his nose.

“No, wait” the intern began, but it was futile. Scott was on his feet and charging back over towards Tessa.

Dr Brown turned around and saw that the girl was looking paler than before, and tears streaming down her face as she sobbed and cried out “No, no, no!”


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Forget the gauze,” he shouts over his shoulder, “Somebody get me a gurney, a crash cart, and page Dr Shepherd! Now!”

“No, no, no, please don’t cut off my skates,” Tessa yelped as she saw Dr Karev coming towards her feet with the scissors. “Scott please, please don’t let them, we won the free dance at Worlds when I was wearing those skates, they take so long to break in, I can’t stand the blisters and how stiff and weird they feel on the ice, like I’m Bambi trying to find his balance…”

She was babbling, tears streaming down her face. Scott understood though, nodded along kindly, rubbing his hand up and down her forearm in an attempt to comfort her and settle her back down against the pillow on the bed.

“Can you take them off without cutting them?” he asks.

“I can,” said Karev, “but it’s not the normal protocol, and it will probably hurt if we try to pull them off.”

“Just do it,” gasped Tessa, leaning forward trying to make a grab for the laces, only to howl in pain as she stretched the leg muscles that were most definitely conspiring against her. She fell back on the bed, hands grasping at the scratchy cotton sheets, screaming silently as her head tipped back in agony, tears falling from the corners of her eyes.

Scott looked terrified at her reaction. Tears pricked in his eyes too as he kept his left hand in hers, reaching with his right to untie the knots in her laces. Karev went to hand him the scissors, but Scott’s glare back at him made him pull his arm back quietly and place the scissors back on the cart.

“Dr Grey, we have a patient who needs a consult” came Nurse Rachel’s voice from behind her.

“Sure. Dr Hunt, Dr Karev, you can handle it from here, yeah?” she turned to follow Rachel cross the ER to the waiting patient.

Karev and Hunt turned back to the two skaters just as Scott was removing the second skate. Tessa’s hands were balled into fists at her sides.

“Jeez, Tess, your legs are really swollen” he said, “I’m sure they didn’t look like that before.” He stepped back a bit, feeling a wave of nausea at the sight of Tessa’s legs, which were starting to turn a shade of purple.

“Karev, page Dr Torres. Quickly. Tessa, I’m going to give you something for the pain, ok?”

“Uh huh” she manages to squeak out, eyes still clenched shut, both hands squeezing Scott’s tighter.

**

By the time Dr Torres arrives in the ER to see Tessa the morphine had kicked in. She has relaxed against the bed, leaning slightly into Scott’s arm where he stands by her side, his hand now holding hers gently. Uninhibited because of the drugs and relieved to be temporarily free of the pain she tells Dr Torres the truth about her legs. Scott’s face switches between hurt, shock and fear as Tessa explains that she has been feeling pain in her shins and calves for months during practice. She’s been treating herself for shin splints as that’s what the internet had told her it probably was. They first swelled up a couple of weeks ago, after they ran their full programmes for the first time that summer in practice. 

Dr Torres states that no, this is definitely not shin splints. She suspects compartment syndrome, and is concerned that whilst what Tessa has described in the past sounds like it is chronic, what is presenting right in front of her looks like it’s acute. There’s only one option and that’s surgery to relieve the pressure in her leg muscles.

“Surgery?!” both Tessa and Scott exclaim at the same time.

“No, I can’t have surgery, we haven’t got time” she pleads, “isn’t there something else? Physiotherapy, ice baths?”

“Unless you want your muscles and nerves to become necrotic and die, surgery is your only option” explains Dr Torres. It may be harsh, but she has experience with athletes and she knows you normally need to scare them with the facts to stop them from damaging their bodies further with their pursuits.

Tessa swallows with a squeaky sob, her lower lip beginning to tremble.

“Ok” she mumbles, resigned. She reaches for Scott again, his hands have now balled into fists, taking offence at the tone the Dr has taken with Tessa. He gets like this sometimes, normally because of something heartless a coach says to her during practice, and then the littlest things set him off.

“Scott. Scotty.” Her tone is calm and gentle now, voice assured despite the earlier emotion. “It’s going to be ok, please, take a deep breath, stay calm.”

He relaxes at her voice and the touch of her hand on his arm. He feels useless. Here’s Tessa, hurt and in pain on a hospital bed, and it’s her who is comforting him, just because of his stupid temper and his desperate need to protect her. Whilst he might have the physical strength on the ice, he knows that her emotional strength off it is superior.

“I’m sorry, Tessa.” He closes his eyes and leans his forehead down to hers and taking a few deep breaths to calm himself. They stay this way for a few minutes until,

“Alright then,” Dr Torres’ voice causes him to snap his head up, rocking back on his heels slightly as he struggles to recover his equilibrium. “We’re going to take you up to X-Ray, Tessa, just to check there are no fractures in your legs or pelvis from the fall, which could be causing the swelling to worsen. We’ll take a quick shot of your head too whilst we’re there, just to check there is no other injury apart from the gash. I’ll get Dr Sloan, the plastic surgeon, to drop in and stitch you up whilst you’re under later.”

Tessa nodded quietly, secretly pleased to hear that an actual plastic surgeon would be fixing her face, and not that nervous looking intern who was checking Scott over earlier. The Orderly arrived with the hospital bed she would be transported in, and he and Dr Karev transferred her over to it gently. As she was pushed away she saw a nurse come over to begin stripping and cleaning the ER bed she had previously occupied.

“Scott my skates!” her voice calling out snapped him out of the daze he was in, staring at where the nurse was writing her name on the admittance board. He went over to the bed to rescue her skates, tying the laces together and hanging them off his shoulder.

“Hey kid” Scott spun around upon hearing Dr Hunt’s voice and winced slightly as one of the uncovered blades caught his back. He was so concerned with getting Tessa help earlier, he’d completely forgotten about her skate guards. Come to think of it, he now had no idea where his skates had ended up. He looked down at his scruffy Converse, still only half on his feet. “Dr Karev will take you up to the waiting room while Tessa’s in X-Ray. I’ll try and swing by the ward later to check on you both, ok?”

“Ok,” says Scott, “thank you Dr Hunt.” He offers him a tight smile as he allows himself to be led away from the ER by Karev.

**

The X-Rays don’t take long, and fortunately don’t show any broken bones. Scott takes pride in this fact, knowing that he protected her (to the extent that he could) when they fell earlier on. Tessa now seems at peace with the prospect of surgery and hopeful that the pain that she has dealt with in silence for the past few months will soon go away, but Scott is getting more anxious by the minute. His head is starting to pound a little and the nausea has returned from earlier, but he puts on his bravest face for Tess. They both sit quietly as they wait for the surgical team to arrive to take her away to the OR, hands clasped together, breathing synchronised.

She breaks first. They won’t let Scott be with her whilst they put her under, and she’s suddenly terrified. “We don’t do things alone, Scotty” she cries, “we’re a team, we’re there to support each other.”

“It’s the rules Tess” he tries to console her, tries to be as brave as he can, “don’t worry, I’ll be right there by your side as soon as you wake up.” He kisses her hands, then her forehead. His eyes flicker down to her lips, so do hers to his, but he doesn’t move any further. He’s wanted to kiss her for years now, but this is neither the time nor the place. He smiles at her, and is met by a watery one of her own. They push her away down the hall and through a set of double doors into the OR. Scott is left standing there, he reaches up to hold onto her skate, squeezing it and wishing it was her hand instead.

20 minutes later, Dr Karev comes into the waiting room. Scott startles slightly, not expecting to see him return so soon and for a split second fearing the worst.

“It’s ok,” says Karev “I was called away to check on a baby up in paeds. I’ll come straight back down to the OR when I’m done and then I’ll come and update you, alright?” 

Scott nods, and Dr Karev turns away to towards the lift.

“I think I love her.” He doesn’t know why he suddenly blurts it out, especially not across the waiting room to a Doctor he’s only known for a few hours. But Tessa had once said something about the importance of getting things off your chest, and lightening your mental load. She’d read it in one of her sports psychology textbooks for college.

Dr Karev sighs kindly, sends a message on his phone to Dr Robbins asking her to check on the baby instead, and returns to lead Scott into a chair.

“Why don’t you tell me about it.”

Scott explains their history. How they’ve skated since they were children. How he always saw her as his kid sister, but that things have changed as they’ve become more successful and her confidence has grown. He wasn’t sure if it was real at first, he thought perhaps it was a side effect of having to have more grown up and romantically charged skating programmes. He admits that he saw stars when their lips brushed during their free skate at worlds a few months ago (he feels like he is seeing stars again just thinking about it). He thought he had a handle on it all, but the prospect that she could suddenly be gone was too much to take. But what scared him most was that she might not feel the same way back.

Dr Karev listens and is sympathetic. He sees a lot of himself in Scott. Passionate, but with a volatile temper. A kind soul with a steely exterior, desperately trying to fit into the expectations of what a man in his role should be and do.

“Look kid” he can’t help it, Scott doesn’t look anywhere near 16, let alone 20. “You need to tell her, you need to talk about it together.” He says this confidently, because Scott doesn’t know that Tessa just tearily admitted to the same thing before the anaesthesiologist put her under in the OR, whispering that she wished he’d kissed her as she drifted off to sleep. It isn’t his place to say, but it won’t stop him from nudging these kids towards each other. He’s a little jealous really, they’re so young and appear to have found their soulmates. He was a complete mess at Tessa’s age.

Scott’s phone begins to ring (his ringtone is ‘Everybody Dance Now’, which makes Karev chuckle), so he leaves him in the waiting room, promising to return with an update as soon as he can.

It’s his mother, scolding him for not calling her to say they’d had an accident and that Tessa was hurt and needed surgery. Instead she had learnt it from Kate who had called up frantically, asking if she wanted her to pick her up on her way across the border to the hospital. His voice is vacant, but Scott insists he is fine, that she doesn’t need to come and that he will call her when he has more information. The reality of the situation suddenly sets in now that everything has stopped and he is just waiting here alone. He wants to call his mother back and ask if she could come to the hospital too, but decides not to. He wishes his pride would allow him to admit that all he really needed was a hug from his mum.

**

When Dr Hunt walks past the surgical waiting room a little later on he sees Scott, sitting ashen-faced, staring into to the distance, hands clasped in his lap. Tessa’s white skates still hanging by their laces over his shoulder. He walks over and sits down in the seat next to him,

“She’ll be fine you know. It’s a routine procedure, one that Dr Torres has done countless times. She’s in very safe hands.”

Scott opens his mouth to speak, but only a choked sob comes out. Dr Hunt puts his hand on his shoulder in support.

“I don’t know what I’d do without her,” he whispers, “and I don’t mean competing together, this goes way beyond that. She’s my best friend, the only person I have in this city. We haven’t gone without seeing each other almost every day for 10 years…” His words trailed off, tears falling down his face. Hunt understood, his time in the army taught him how much you relied on your teammates when you are far from home and in a stressful environment.

“Are your parents on their way?”

“Her Mum is, I told mine not to come.” He sniffs loudly, wiping his nose with his sleeve (Dr Hunt does not see the drops of blood left behind on it as Scott crosses his arms over his chest). “My sister-in-law just had a baby, I don’t want her coming to the hospital and picking up germs to take home to them.”

“Look, kid…’ Hunt wants to reassure him, offer some advice about watching your colleagues get hurt in the field, but his opening words are cut off by his pager calling a 911.

**

Dr Hunt arrives back at the nurses’ station a couple of hours later, having dealt with the ‘trauma’ that Dr Brown was panicking over (which turned out to be routine appendicitis, not the intestinal blockage he had mistaken it for). He is planning on checking on a few of his patients from earlier in his shift. As he reaches over the desk for the chart being handed to him he sees Scott, still sitting in the waiting area. He is now hunched over, his head in his hands, Tessa’s white figure skates sitting neatly next to him. He speaks to Nurse Kathleen, and nods his head towards Scott. 

“Hey, is he doing ok, has anyone been down with an update recently?”

“I’m not sure, Dr Hunt” she replies, “Dr Karev was here about an hour ago, said it was all going ok so far, and promised him he’d come down and let him know as soon as the girl was out of surgery. He’s been sitting like that ever since. Poor thing, he seems like a sweet kid.”

“Thanks, Kathleen, maybe I’ll just take him a glass of water, check he’s holding up alright.”

As he fills the cup from the jug behind the desk he hears the Chief’s voice, coming from the stairs that lead down to the waiting area.

“Why is there a kid bleeding in my OR waiting room?”

Dr Hunt spins around quickly. Bleeding? He rushes over, and sure enough sees a small puddle of blood has formed on the floor between Scott’s half-shoed feet.

“Could you grab me some gauze?” he calls across to the nurses’ station.

He then turns back to Scott, kneels down on the floor next to his chair and said, “Hey kid, lift your head up for me, let’s get this cleaned up.”

Scott doesn’t move. Dr Hunt notices his shoulders sway slightly, his head start to roll to one side and his body begin to pitch forward out of his seat. 

Shit.

He catches Scott and guides him down to the floor in the waiting area. 

“Forget the gauze,” he shouts over his shoulder, “Somebody get me a gurney, a crash cart, and page Dr Shepherd! Now!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me FOREVER to write the middle part of this chapter and now I am exhausted. The two main ideas I had for this fic were the opening scene from the first chapter, and this closing scene here. Now that I've finally written the in between I'm very satisfied. I'm still not happy that my words don't match up to the clear pictures in my head, but I guess its practice and process.
> 
> It's a long weekend here this weekend so hopefully I'll get some more written then. 
> 
> Enjoy!

**Author's Note:**

> I have seriously struggled to write this. I can see it so so clearly in my mind, but getting it on the page was hard! I may come back and edit it at some point. I changed my mind 3 times on whether to use Original Characters Drs or use Drs from Grey’s, with whom I am more familiar and can picture more easily. The intern is an OC though. 
> 
> At one stage I was going to set it out as a TV script, but then I decided that would be harder. You kind of have to imagine this happening within an episode with other storylines in it, so time will jump on a bit between scenes. I haven’t watched Grey’s for a few years now, and I would say this is set in the seasons 4-8 era in terms of the Doctors on the staff and their level of experience.
> 
> I’ve followed GA tradition by giving this a song title name (TS have skated to many songs which have also been used as episode titles). I went on Google to find a suitable title for this, searching for song titles with ‘ice’ in them. There were a few, some too obvious, too well known, one used for THAT fic. I saw there was a Pink Floyd one, so went to listen on it on YouTube. I felt like the lyrics applied nicely to this version of the story that I would like to tell.
> 
> Also, I am absolutely not a Doctor, nor do I have any medical knowledge (I just like TV dramas set in hospitals!). If anyone has any expertise they’d like to share I would be very grateful.


End file.
